Snap

What's with Dana?

Become a Fan

Google Analytics

Blogads

business strategy

February 20, 2015

The biggest life change in decades is now beginning. We are leaving an age of bundled, curated video content and entering an age of self-selected, self-curated content.

The unbundling of cable, the decision of millions to go “over the top” and choose instead to get their entertainment directly from the Internet, is one of the great sea changes of this decade, driven by rising costs and (perhaps more important) a shortage of time. Lost may be serendipity, the decision to watch things because they are on.

Today, for instance, I watched George Englund’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 MGM film in which Anthony Quinn plays a radical cross between Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis, renouncing communism and wealth at the same time in the name of secular decency. Given that it was made early in the pontificate of Paul VI (John Gielgud gets one scene playing a nice version of Paul, then dies to make way for the plot) it is many decades ahead of its time. (Quinn’s character is even proclaimed a cardinal from Lvov, which is in western Ukraine, and a starving China drives the plot.) But it’s not what I would be watching if I had the whole world to choose from.

February 06, 2015

A lot of people like to say these days that America is no longer a democracy. True, absent a crisis, and it has always been true. Most of the time, most people don’t care. Democracy, for most of us, is a gun we keep locked in the drawer.

And that is actually fine. If you’re not motivated to vote, you’re voting for the ways things are, you’re voting “yes” on whatever those who do vote wind up voting for. If you don’t vote, then bitch-and-moan that “we’re not a democracy” and “my vote doesn’t count,” you’re an idiot. Because it’s the opportunity to vote that matters.

But there is an area where in the last several decades we have lost democracy, and seem to have lost any hope of getting it back. That’s in corporations.

January 09, 2015

One of the good things about losing the Senate is that it liberates President Obama from his habit of trying to placate Congress. He can act as he wants, and say what he wants. Given that the things he says and wants have wide support, albeit inch-deep support, this is of huge political benefit.

One thing he’s free to say now is that America deserves a raise, because it does. So-called Wall Street “analysts,” with their 8-figure incomes, love to bemoan “wage pressures” on the economy, as though that’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. But America has been under wage pressure for years, from the wealthy, and the economy has done fine.

The great historic achievement of this President, history will record, is what he has done for the rich. While the percentage of national income held by the rich fell sharply during the Great Depression, and in fact fell after every panic before that, it has recovered completely since the Great Recession, which this President solved through stimulus and an activist Federal Reserve. This President kept the rich from poverty

December 26, 2014

Every business era has a leading industry, a ruling industry, and a fading industry.

It’s clear that for our time – for the rest of my life anyway – the leading industry will be computing and the fading industry will be energy. The rising industry will likely be biosciences, including everything from prosthetics to genetic engineering.

December 12, 2014

This is Volume 18, Number 50 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. This is the last time, however, that I will use the Clue meme as part of my weekly column. Starting next week, and going forward, we'll go straight to the column. Enjoy.

This could have been the 1930s. It’s shaping up to be the 1970s.

Not only are we getting stagflation instead of Depression, but we’re also finding ourselves, again, in a decade defined by energy. But while the 1970s were a decade of energy scarcity, this will become a decade of energy abundance.

Republicans want to credit fracking with all that has happened in our time. That technology has had an impact much like Obama’s Stimulus – it has accelerated changes already taking place. First natural gas went into glut, and this year oil went into glut.

Whether the glut is temporary or permanent, it’s permanent. Because the glut is giving alternative energy sources time and space to grow in. It’s also providing incentives for solar and wind to keep costs down, to keep innovating, because the ceiling under which they define “crossover” is a sinking one.

December 05, 2014

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 48 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago I posited the theory that President Obama threw the last election so that Democrats can come back stronger in 2016 and beyond.

But there’s another theory, and it’s based on a recent visit to the suburbs.

Atlanta is divided into two parts. I live Inside the Perimeter (ITP). Most of the city is Outside the Perimeter (OTP), the I-285 ring freeway dividing them from one another. I’ve been surprised that anyone could be against this government since life is great ITP. My home’s value has increased, there are tons of new shops and restaurants opening up within walking distance, and the new intown malls built over the last 10 years are crowded all the time.

As I’ve written here many times, the center of our economic life is changing. It’s moving from offices to labs. Most of the jobs done in office towers – marketing, middle management, etc. – can now be done by computers. Those jobs aren’t coming back.

The Mad Man era is over, Willy Loman is now an algorithm, and if Dan Draper can’t code he’s hitting the bricks alongside him. The offices that remain are basically factories, software factories. Atlanta is lucky to have so many software companies, especially in complex areas like transaction processing, which happens to be where my wife has made her career.

S0 economically, things are great in my household. I have been doing pretty well moving my beat from technology to finance. She has been doing great at her job, which she’s very good at. Our assets have grown substantially in the last six years, and our lives much more convenient. It has been a great time for us.

November 21, 2014

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 46 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

2014 has been a good year for business, a good year for investors, a good year for mankind generally.

For writers, not so much.

What’s happening is that run of network ad rates are dropping to the floor, mobile makes this worse, so news sites are responding by ditching writers in favor of talking heads. If you watch some sell-side analyst tout his merchandise for five minutes, that’s five minutes the site can spend throwing ads at you, and it’s basically free – just point the camera. There is no news value in it. Getting five minutes out of a reader, on the other hand, requires that you deliver some serious content, or at least an original take. This costs money. And no one has money.

Back then Georgia had an umbilical relationship then with my home state, New York, the original “Empire State.” Georgia, and the states around it, were where New York outsourced manufacturing that required large amounts of labor. Georgia was the original India.

Back in the 1950s the South was filled with textile mills of all kinds, and Atlanta was the regional center to which all those plants reported. One reason the Atlanta business community was so anxious to do business with this city’s black leaders, and advertise itself as “the city too busy to hate,” was to protect that relationship with New York, which didn’t much care for overt racism. For all his faults, the original John D. Rockefeller believed in racial equality. His wife was the Spelman of Spelman College. And throughout the years of my upbringing our governor was Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of John D.

September 19, 2014

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 37 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

Ever since I became a working journalist, in 1978, I have said that the industry needs new business models to continue. I was ignored, and the whole enterprise is now threatened by that failure.

My son is now the same age I was in 1978. He’s 23. His ambition is to become a scientific researcher. He will get his biology degree next spring and is looking for a graduate program. (If you want a German-Irish Atlantan who can speak to your Chinese and Arabic-speaking grad students, drop a line.)

Until recently I naively figured there was no way he’d run into the same kind of business model problem, and intransigence, I did in my life. I was wrong.

As a recent NPR piece showed biomedical researchers are addicted to a single business model, applying for (and somehow getting) government grants to support basic research. This is unreliable. It leads to boom-and-bust cycles that destroy careers.

September 12, 2014

Think of this as Volume 18, Number 36 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

The darkness in any generational crisis consists of false choices, with advocates of “once and for all” solutions lined up against supporters of democracy, of liberty, and of free markets.

So far, democracy has won every time.

But when people are inside the crisis, it’s hard to tell that this will be the outcome. Until then, the crisis continues.

At this point it’s important to understand the nature of the current crisis. It’s not about the housing bubble, and it’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It’s about oil, which is in such artificial scarcity as to actually be the world’s currency. Those who have it have, since 1973, been soaking up the rest of the world’s wealth for themselves, and its political power, as the world runs on oil.